Intersubjective Plateaus in Language and Communication

In colonial Africa, the introduction of literacy caused many changes in traditional cultures. The first of these changes was the way of approaching story telling from an individual perspective in a society, which has spread the traditions and customs by means of the collective voice of the griots or the singings of the communal space. The result of this colonial encounter will substitute the community for the individual voice of the writer.

The second change was caused by the introduction of the European languages (English and French, but also Portuguese and German) in many of the levels of the society from administration to education. Thus, the vernacular languages will be fenced into the familiar spaces and domestic areas. In the particular case of Western Africa, English was adopted as an official language by Liberia in 1847. In the rest of the countries of the area – Gambia, Sierra Leone, Nigeria or Cameroon – the presence of English was consolidated by the Conference of Berlin in 1884–85 and the scramble of Africa. In the twentieth century, the choice of English encompasses a certain amount of pragmatism because publishing in English widens the audience and solves the problem of the modern borders of the African States, as the ethnic and linguistic realities have no connection with the lines drawn on the map.

2. The abiku/ogbanje motif in Nigerian culture

The definition of orature compels me to think that the ogbanje/abiku myth has moved from the spoken word to the written one by means of writers who have maintained the oral heritage of the community throughout their writings. The myth in itself describes children that move from the world of the dead to the one of the living in a continuous cycle of life and death. In Ogbolu Okonji’s words (1970: 1): “An individual who goes through a continuous circle of birth and death as a result of a primeval oath (iyi uwa: oath of the world) taken in the spirit world in the presence of the creator and binding on the living.” So, the abiku/ogbanje is a boy or a girl who belongs to two worlds, the earthly and the spiritual. Withal, s/he is continuously condemned to be born and die (in the same family or in different ones) in a cycle s/he can escape if s/he is able to identify an object or amulet (called iyi uwa) which maintains her/him linked to the underworld spaces. The family and the community generally love and accept the child. Both collaborate to retain him or her and avoid his/her death. There is no preference for the sex of the child, either a boy or a girl. From an anthropological point of view, the origin of the myth may be related with the high rate of infant mortality. Thus, when a mother gives birth to several children who prematurely die, the community interprets this situation as a repeated process of birth and death involving one single child. In her novel Freshwater, Akwaeke Emezi (2018: 88) uses the voice of a spirit child to explain how the community is able to identify an abiku/ogbanje:

And, of course, the human who survived, those selected among them, the ones in white, the ones shaken shells and mineral deposits, the ones ridden, the ones chosen, the ones who follow, work, and serve because calls pass through blood no matter how many oceans you drop death into. Those humans recognized us easily; it was as if they could smell us under the Ada’s skin or feel us in the air that heaved around her (Emezi 2018: 88).